A website on Mathru Sri Sarada

There is a new website on Sri Mathru Sarada started by a her devotees on Navaratri 2007 . Interestingly there is an Ashtottara on Mathru Sri Sarada composed by none other than Sri Lakshmana Swamy after Saradamma's self-realisation. This Ashtottara is unique in that it is a composition on a living Jnani by a living Jnani and by a Guru on his disciple. You may check it out on page "Pooja Kalpamu"

The link is http://mathrusrisarada.org/

Religious and Yogic practices

Religious and yogic exercises have long been used as a personal and cosmic preparation, purifying personal motives and expanding cosmic views, in order to prepare for an eventual enquiry into impartial truth. In the end, that enquiry must leave behind all personal development and the entire cosmos that is seen through body and through mind.

Swami Atmananda Krishna Menon

Now there is the strange fact that Ramana Maharshi himself refused to be ‘the Guru’ of his devotees...or to be exact, he never initiated any of them in the traditional way. Some of them are known to have left him, though they loved and worshipped him, because they thought themselves unable to proceed spiritually without an outer guru. How is this strange attitude of his to be understood? Did the sage shun the responsibility which the guru is expected to take over in respect to his devotee? According to tradition, the guru who accepts a disciple also takes over his karma, bad as it may be.

No. Sri Ramana Maharshi was only being consistent; he lived what he taught...the realisation of the One without a second! When there is only One, Brahman, where is the place for guru and disciple? A guru presupposes a disciple, a disciple a guru; they are invariable ‘two’. Can there be two Selves, the one guiding the other? True guidance is possible only when the Self of the guru and that of the disciple is one and the same Self.

-Hunting the I by Lucy Cornelssen

Grace and Guru

I HAVE NOT SAID THAT A GURU IS NOT NECESSARY. But a Guru need not always be in human form. First a person thinks that he is inferior and that there is a superior, all knowing, all powerful God who controls his own and the world’s destiny and worships him or does bhakti. When he reaches a certain stage and becomes fit for enlightenment, the same God whom he was worshipping comes as Guru and leads him onward. That Guru comes only to tell him, ‘That God is within yourself. Dive within and realize’. God, Guru and the Self are the same. Realization is the result of the Master’s (Guru’s) grace, more than teachings, lectures, meditations, etc. They are only secondary aids, whereas the former is the primary and essential cause.

Guru’s grace is always there. You imagine it to be something somewhere high up in the sky, far away and which has to descend. It is really inside you in your Heart, and the moment, by any of the methods, you effect subsidence or merger of the mind into its source, the grace rushes forth, spouting as from a spring from within you. Contact with jnanis is good. They will work through silence. A Guru is not the physical form. Hence His contact remains even after the physical form of the Guru vanishes.

Bhagavan Ramana Maharishi